Spider Baby [reviewed by Lackey]

aka The Maddest Story Ever Told; Cannibal Orgy
84 min. (director’s cut), 1968
Directed by Jack Hill
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix • Official Site

An unexpectedly sweet horror movie.

* * *

Premise

Generations of inbreeding have resulted in the genetic decrepitude of the Merrye family, causing its members to be afflicted in puberty with evolutionary atavism as they gradually physically and emotionally regress towards savagery. The final generation of the Merrye family–siblings Elizabeth, Virginia, and Ralph–live in their isolated and decaying ancestral mansion with Bruno, a longtime family servant who promised to take care of the children after the death of their father. (Also living at the mansion: several rarely-seen aunts and uncles fully transformed by the family curse. But the sibling’s idyllic lives are changed forever when shocking news comes: they’re about to be visited by Peter and Emily Howe, two distant cousins (accompanied by their lawyer) who may wish to seize the property and expose the family to the outside world.

Review

I’m not sure that Spider Baby, originally filmed in 1964 but unreleased until 1968, is the first film to deal with the trope of “a bunch of people run afoul of a clan of psychos in the middle of nowhere,” but it’s definitely one of the earliest examples of the trope as we now recognize it. It’s hard not to see it as a bit of a precursor to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and you’ll see in a few days that one of Spider Baby’s most prominent cast members sees a definite connection between the two), and indeed there’s one scene late in the film that convinced me that Tobe Hooper was familiar with Spider Baby when he made Texas Chain Saw.

That being said, it’s a film in a bit of a strange position, heralding a trend towards shocking and brutal horror in cinema, while consistently hearkening back to a more camp-oriented approach rooted in Universal’s classics. The title sequence tells you up front what you’re in for, providing caricatures of the characters drawn in a Jay Ward-cartoon style while Lon Chaney Jr. sings a catchy and campy novelty number: “Sit ’round the fire with this cup of brew,” begins the final verse, “a fiend and a werewolf on each side of you.”

Chaney, who also stars as Bruno (in fact, this seems to have been Chaney’s final starring role), isn’t the only reference of old-style moviemaking on display: Mantan Moreland appears in a brief but memorable role as a hapless messenger not entirely removed from the cowardly servants he made his name portraying during the Depression (he’s best known for having appeared as a recurring character in the Charlie Chan movies). Even a young Sid Haig seems to be deliberately channeling Harpo Marx when playing the hulking, childlike and mostly silent Ralph.

Bruno is the emotional center of the film, and his relationship with the “children” (which also includes Jill Banner as the savagely playful Virginia, the film’s titular “Spider Baby,” and Beverly Washburn as the more composed and responsible but no less disturbed Elizabeth) is genuinely loving, tender and sweet. In many ways, Bruno is to Chaney what Anton Phibes is to Vincent Price: it’s hardly his best performance, but it very neatly sums up everything we like about him as an actor.

It helps that there’s a lot of genuine rapport between the foursome, even though Banner and Washburn aren’t the most skilled of actresses. Haig is magnetic, stealing almost all of his scenes. Another inspired comedic performance comes from Karl Schanzer as Schlocker (no, really), the Howes’ mustachioed lawyer, while the Howes themselves, played by Quinn Redeker (Peter) and Carol Ohmart (Emily), are consummate straight men.

However, as much fun as the cast is to watch, I don’t that the overall film is as consistent as it should be. The campy approach is often at odds with the film’s darker and more disturbing thematic elements such as incest and cannibalism (apparently, writer/director Jack Hill’s intended title was Cannibal Orgy), and I don’t feel that Hill really reconciles the conflicting approaches in a satisfying way. He does do a fairly good job of getting the central theme across, which is how to deal with dangerous individuals who commit violent and destructive acts while being incapable of understanding the “wrongness” of those actions–a theme I wish movies (not just within the horror genre, either) would deal with in a less black-and-white and more nuanced and thoughtful manner.

There’s a bit of messy storytelling: the film’s Wikipedia article refers to one of the characters “seducing” the other, but what was presented frankly looked less like seduction and more like outright rape (not sure what Hill’s actual intention was), which makes one of the involved characters’ actions later look a bit bizarre. (I think I know the reasoning behind what happens, but I’m just speculating; it’s hardly made particularly clear.) The action sequences are staged a bit awkwardly staged (early on, a character finds himself ensnared in a trap he should really have no trouble freeing himself from).

For all its flaws, Spider Baby remains a memorable exercise in the macabre, and has a lot of laugh-out loud moments…not to mention a weirdly sweet undertone you usually don’t see in films like this.

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